Given to a Duke Far Too Old, She Wept for Her Dreams—But on Wedding Night His First Gift Amazed Her

Chapter 7

Baron Silas Thorne was not what Isolde had expected.

He was handsome in the way of a knife — elegant, polished, easy to hold in the light. Forty years old, perhaps, with dark hair swept back and a mouth that smiled as though it had been taught the shape without ever feeling it. He entered the great hall of Hollowmere as though the house belonged to him, trailing the smell of cologne and something underneath it, something old and sweet and wrong.

The Duke stood at the head of the hall, stone-still, his hands behind his back. Isolde stood at his side, her chin high, her heart a trapped thing beating against her ribs.

“Your Grace.” Thorne bowed, and the bow was insultingly shallow. “Forgive the intrusion. I have come to discuss a contract.”

“There is nothing to discuss.” The Duke’s voice was level as a blade. “The debt is paid. The marriage is done. You have no claim here.”

“Ah, but I do.” Thorne produced a folded paper from his coat, worn and creased, and held it up to the light of the fire. “Your stepmother’s signature, Your Grace. Dated the week of your father’s death. It conveys your person, Miss Rynne — pardon, Your Grace — to me, in full satisfaction of the elder Rynne’s obligations. It is a legal instrument. It was signed before witnesses.” His smile widened. “It does not mention you, Duke. It mentions her. And a piece of paper signed in ink does not stop being a piece of paper simply because you chose to pay off a more convenient debt.”

The hall was silent. Isolde could feel the eyes of the servants in the shadows, the painted eyes of Eleanor Marlow on the wall, watching.

“You think to take my wife,” the Duke said, “by parchment.”

“I think,” Thorne said, “that I have been very patient. I allowed you your little romance. I allowed you to play at saviour. But I have buried two wives already, and I am not in the habit of letting a third be stolen out from under me by a man whose own family has been burying women for a century.”

Isolde stepped forward. She did not plan it. Her body moved before her mind could stop it, and she heard her own voice come out steady and cold, the voice of a woman who had been traded twice and was finished with it.

“You buried two wives,” she said, “because you are the thing that killed them. And you will not bury me, because I am not yours to bury. I was never yours. My stepmother had no right to sign me away, and you knew it — that is why you are here now, arguing with paper, instead of coming to take what you claim is yours. Because you know that if you tried, this house — and everyone in it — would see what you are.”

The smile on Thorne’s face flickered. Behind him, the doors to the hall were open, and servants had gathered in the corridor, no longer pretending not to listen.

The Duke stepped up beside her. His hand found hers and held it, and she felt the tremor in his fingers — fear, or pride, or both.

“You may take your contract and leave,” the Duke said quietly, “or you may press your claim in a court of law, in front of the whole county, and I will tell them everything I know about the balconies of your estate and the physicians you stopped calling. I have evidence, Thorne. I have testimony. I have been collecting it for years, waiting for the day you came for someone I could not let you have.”

The silence that followed had teeth.

And then Thorne did something that made the blood in Isolde’s veins run cold.

He laughed.

“Collecting evidence. Oh, that is rich.” He turned his head, and his eyes found Isolde’s — bright, sharp, knowing. “Did he tell you, sweet girl, why he collects it? Did he tell you why he has a file on every man who trades in brides, why he watches the courts and the settlements like a hawk?” He tilted his head. “Did he tell you that he did not choose you? That you were not picked out of pity or justice or a soft heart?”

“Silence,” the Duke said, but there was a crack in his voice.

“Did he tell you,” Thorne went on, softly, delighted, “that he has been searching for the daughter of Rosalind Rynne for fifteen years? That your mother was his obsession before you were? That the only reason he cares about you at all — the only reason you are standing in this hall instead of on my property — is that you are the child of the woman who was the last companion of the Duchess Eleanor?”

Isolde’s hand went cold in the Duke’s grip.

The portraits on the wall seemed to lean in. The fire spat.

Thorne smiled, slow and satisfied, the smile of a man who had just shown a match to the fuse of a house he did not live in.

“He did not tell you, did he? No, of course not.” He clicked his tongue. “Men never do. Ask him, Your Grace. Ask your husband why the name Rynne has been on his lips since before you were born. Ask him what he knows about your mother.”

And Thorne bowed, and walked out into the grey afternoon, leaving the door open behind him, leaving the two of them standing in the wreckage of the silence.

Isolde turned to face the Duke.

The Duke of Hollowmere — the legend, the man of stone, the man who had freed her with a key and sworn no one should be forced to love — looked at her with a grief so old and so vast that she knew, in that instant, that every word of it was true.

“Julian,” she said. “What does he know about my mother?”

And the fire cracked, and the house held its breath, and the Duke of Hollowmere closed his eyes like a man about to confess at last, after thirty-five years of silence.